In recent years, novelist Keigo Higashino's best-selling work "The Dedication of Suspect X" has been adapted into different versions of films by filmmakers in China, Japan and South Korea, and has achieved widespread attention and good box office results. The Japanese version was first released in 2008, directed by Hiroshi Nishitani, which is a special part of the "Detective Galileo" TV series; The Korean version was directed by Fang Eun-jin and released in 2012, and the title was changed to "Suspect X"; The Chinese version of "The Dedication of Suspect X" was directed by Su Youpeng and released in 2017. Although China, Japan and South Korea are geographically similar, they have their own cultural interests and national aesthetic psychology.
This determines that filmmakers in China, Japan and South Korea have made corresponding adjustments according to their local viewing habits and the creator's own aesthetic preferences when adapting. This paper takes the film version of "The Dedication of Suspect X" in China, Japan and South Korea as the research object, and focuses on analyzing the different creative choices and presentation effects of China, Japan and South Korea based on their respective national aesthetic psychology in the process of adaptation and recreation. This article will combine the character and plot construction of these three films, the details of pictures and colors, actors' performances and dialogue, etc., to explore the reconstruction of genre films under the influence of aesthetic psychology of different audiences.
Japanese Reasoning Film: The Collapse of Absolute Reason and Self-Destructive Sacrifice
There is often a tendency to self-destruct in Japanese literary and artistic creation, which is often reflected in the suicide of the main characters. The self-destructive tendencies of the Japanese literary and artistic world are remarkable all over the world, whether it is Yukio Mishima, Osamu Dazai, or Yasunari Kawabata, whose works and their own circumstances proclaim an aesthetic of death. The magnificent beauty is found in death, and the dramatic relationship between the self and the world is rendered to the extreme in self-destruction. "The aesthetics of death is an integral aspect of traditional Japanese beauty, and Kawabata and Mishima's attitude towards death coincides with the poles of classical beauty, Kawabata's depiction is as delicate as an ice flower, and Mishima's depiction is as sharp as a sharp blade."
At the level of Japanese national aesthetic psychology, there is an aesthetic need for this cruel act of self-destruction. In today's society, where the pressure of survival and workplace pressure is too high, the demand for this problem is constantly amplified. Most of the innovation in Japanese society has been handled by large enterprises, and the "busy poor" who cannot find stable jobs and the "window people" who have nothing to do and wait for retirement have become a strange landscape of modern civilization. The excessive pursuit of reason and modernization has also plunged Japan into the abyss of modernity, which deepens the self-destructive impulse of the national psyche.
In the Japanese version of "The Dedication of Suspect X", Tetsuya Ishigami is the representative of the survivors of Japan's low-desire society. As a middle school math teacher, he lives a step-by-step life every day. It seems to be related to his hobby, which is as accurate as mathematics – but in fact it is the epitome of the Japanese middle class living in a pool of backwater. Tetsuya Ishigami's mental state is an excellent representative of Japanese people in urban life. As a representative megalopolis in Asia, behind the prosperity of Tokyo is a group of depressed, dreary, depressed, hopeless modern urban dwellers.
This division is ultimately a matter of modernity. Every major city in the process of modernization will experience or is experiencing the same pains. "However, 'modernity' as an institutional, materialized, secular, and instrumental rationality can be the 'object of criticism' of Western 'aesthetic modernity' and 'romantic modernity' (Wilmer's language) in the eyes of Western scholars." The thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment tried to pursue absolute rationality, ignoring that human nature is a delicate balance between sensibility and reason, and excessive pursuit of absolute rationality is also an anti-human nature. In human history, there have been many disasters associated with the question of modernity. "There are many such examples, such as the genocide of Jews by the German Nazis before World War II, which claimed to have entered the 'modern era', the US-Soviet arms race after World War II, the theory of the clash of civilizations after the drastic changes in Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the genocide in the Balkans." This is reflected and symbolized in Tetsuya Ishigami's room.
Tetsuya Shigami is obsessed with mathematics and is a fan of absolute rationality. The same is true of Yukawa, who is also a representative of reason as a physics professor and police detective adviser, while his laboratory is extremely crowded and cluttered, with tables and floors full of things, which is not a comfortable space for activities. Reason and logic brought him loneliness and depression. Ishigami Tetsuya lay on the bed, empty and depressed. Human nature comes with the pursuit of familiarity and the search for strangeness, which is rooted in our primitive memory.
It is difficult for people to endure endless "repetition", and eating the same taste of food with high frequency can be boring. And Tetsuya Ishigami can insist on buying the "signature bento" at the bento shop where his next-door neighbor Yasuko Hanaoka is located, which shows that his feelings for Yasuko Hanaoka have made him deviate from normal. Tetsuya Ishigami's tones are always cold, and even when talking to Yasuko Hanaoka in a phone booth, the cold tones of his pictures contrast sharply with the warm tones of Yasuko Hanaoka's pictures.
The brutal act of self-destruction manifests itself in Tetsuya Ishigami as murder - he thinks he can save people by murder. Tetsuya Ishigami's murder is also suicidal and self-destructive, and is neither a simple story of redemption nor a simple story of sacrifice. It is complex and has heavy traces of Christian influence. This involves the spread and influence of the core and aesthetics of Christian elements among the Japanese people. It can be said that the film clearly explains this religious atmosphere of sacrifice with sin. "Japanese Christianity is spread throughout almost all prefectures, provinces, prefectures, prefectures, and cities in Japan, of which the distribution of Roman Catholicism is slightly different from that of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and most of the Japanese Protestantism is centered on Tokyo and radiates to the whole country."
When Tetsuya Ishigami was about to hang herself, Yasuko Hanaoka, who had just moved next door, came knocking on the door to say hello, so Tetsuya Ishigami gave up the idea of suicide. But looking carefully at the whole film, Shi Shen Zheya's mental state is still dying. Whether he is in class or doing research in his room after work, he still does not care about life and life. Therefore, the author believes that he did not complete his suicide and did not intend to give up suicide. The suicide began the moment he put the rope around his neck, until he murdered the homeless man, put himself in an inhuman situation, annihilated the value of other individuals' lives and completely denied his self-worth.
Only at this moment was his self-destruction completely complete. And the accident of the murder of Yasuko Hanaoka's mother and daughter just gave him an opportunity to self-destruct. No matter how meticulous Shi Shen Tetsuya's logic is, no matter how calm he is in trouble, after all, he is also an ordinary person and will have emotional weaknesses. Therefore, in order not to retract his confession at the upcoming trial, he turned himself into a guilty person in the true sense of the word, a person who deprived innocent people of their right to life.
The pressure of the workplace in Japan and the survival dilemma of the metropolis have always been the basic themes of genre film creation. This is reflected in two aspects: on the one hand, healing film and television works such as "Little Forest", "Late Night Canteen", "Bread and Soup and Good Weather for Cats" and "Watermelon" are widely popular in the Japanese market. On the other hand, workplace dramas and movies such as "Hansawa Naoki", "White Tower", "We Can't Be Beasts", and "This Cannot Be Reimbursed" more or less show the cruelty and fierce competition of Japanese workplace survival.
After the victim's body was found, the police department held a meeting on the progress of the investigation of the case, and hundreds of investigators in suits and leather shoes sat in the conference room, wearing neat suits and hanging uniform badges, and a piece of black pressing, which visually gave people a sense of oppression. This obviously uses exaggerated techniques, although this case is a serious case, but the American police, South Korean police, etc. in the movie cannot send so many police forces to investigate this murder.
Starting from Japan's modern national psychology, this type of reconstruction is visually very suitable for Japan's cutthroat competition and highly involuted workplace atmosphere. As a new character added to the Japanese version of "The Dedication of Suspect X", which is also the protagonist of Gaku Yukawa, the main character of the Japanese drama "Detective Galileo" adapted from Keigo Higashino's work, Kaoru Utsumi's position in the police station is more reflective of the workplace problems that can be seen everywhere in Japanese society. While all the male investigators were busy discussing and analyzing the case, Kaoru Utsumi's leader very unceremoniously instructed her to pour coffee for the others. In Japan, the status and experience of women in the workplace has been a hot social issue in recent years. Women are widely treated unequally at work, such as discrimination and harassment, and those with power not only do not confess and reflect, but may further abuse their power to cover up crimes. The tradition that seems to have reason and absolute authority has produced many anti-human phenomena in its treatment of specific personnel.
A narrative work that lacks irony will lack critical force. In this story, the most ironic plot is that the "perfect crime" and "absolute reason" pursued by Tetsuya Ishigami also completely collapse at the end of the story. "The fragmentation of reason in modern society has led to the devaluation and oblivion of the value of the human person." In the film, Tetsuya Ishigami saw Yasuko Hanaoka who came to reveal the truth, his emotions finally collapsed, kneeling on the ground crying and shouting, and the calmness and rationality he painstakingly managed were finally replaced by a long-suppressed sensibility. This plot is also easy to be accepted by readers and audiences who live in modern cities, and their sensibility has been suppressed by reason for too long.
At night, on the subway and on the streets of Tokyo and Seoul, there are often office workers who are physically and mentally exhausted and crying drunk. Their sensibility can only sneak out of the body to "breathe" for a moment under the influence of alcohol. The pursuit of absolute rationality will eventually lead to anti-humanity, which is the perfect moral of the original story and the Japanese film adaptation. Unfortunately, both Chinese and Korean filmmakers have lost this underlying theme when working on the same story.
On the whole, because the Japanese version of the film naturally has the attributes of the special part of the TV series "Detective Galileo", this greatly weakens the independence and artistry of the film. Some boring jokes inherited from the TV series make the whole story unserious, and lose the opportunity to compete with Woody Allen's "End of the Game", "The Unreasonable Man" and "Kassandra's Dream". Also a murder-themed film, Woody Allen's three works seem to be full of ridicule and wit, but the core is very serious to inherit some complexity and profundity from Dostoevsky.
Woody Allen organically integrated the sense of absurdity into the character shaping and story construction when he was creating, that is, the murder story itself has the absurd attribute of human existence and death, and the sense of absurdity itself contains elements of black humor. However, the jokes in the Japanese version of "The Dedication of Suspect X" are mainly used to show Yukawa's "high IQ, low EQ" character setting, which will appear extremely incongruous in a serious crime movie.